[codeforpeople-rocks] Question about Bj and ENV variables

First off, I really like Bj. I've used Backgroundrb in a critical
production environment for years, but I need something a little more
lightweight for a current project. Plus Bj comes with job auditing
built in! Awesome.
I'm having some trouble with the infamous RubyInline library required
by ImageScience and I was hoping you could point me to some best
practices for deploying Bj in "diverse" production environments. Allow
me to explain:
Cluster of Mongrels
Java FTP server
Bj
The scenario is simple: a user uploads a file to FTP and a custom Java
event handler shells out to a ruby script that simply POSTS the file
to the rails app running in the customer of mongrels. A simple way for
Ruby and Java to live together. Note that the FTP server was running
as root and therefore had HOME=/root. The mongrels are running as
my_user with HOME=/home/my_user
Here's my problem: For actions initiated from browser to mongrel I
have no problems. However, for actions initiated by posting from the
ruby script that was kicked off by the Java handler I receive the
infamous Permission denied - /root/.ruby_inline - (Errno::EACCES)
error. Now I *think* that this is because the Java process was running
as root and the subprocess it spawned to kick off the Ruby script
through Runtime.exec inherits the ENV of the parent Java process. What
confuses me is why, if Bj is running in a separate process that
initially kicked off by the Mongrel and *not* the subprocess of Java
(I think that's how it works anyway :-/), is the Bj job using root's
ENV?
So the simple answer could be that I'm insane. But there's a gap in my
understanding as to how exactly Bj jobs are getting their ENV
variables. For what it is worth my "solution" was to force RubyInline
to always use /home/my_user through a script in /etc/profile.d that
set INLINEHOME to /home/my_user.
I'm on Fedora with the 2.6.21.7-2 kernel and Ruby 1.8.6.
Many many thanks in advance!
Regards,
Erik